A/N: Okay, as you read, try to guess who's point of view this is! And review, please!!!!

Disclaimer: The professor is the only thing that belongs to us! Everything else is standard disclaimer.

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I looked up into the sky.

It was a dark night, cold and bitter. Remnant patches of snow clung to the ground like tattered patchwork, hanging off the trees in lacy, frozen crystals. Everything was diamond-hard, cemented into an impenetrable solidity by the ceaseless frost and cruel wind.

"Why?" The whisper was bare, torn from any emotion and empty. My eyes trailed bitterly from Orion's Belt and the faithful Sirius dog star to Draco, the dragon. The rich purple backdrop of sky made the stars stand out, brilliant points of light like ice standing out sharply. "Why did it have to be him?"

It was, as my intellect tried prissily to remind me from the back of my clouded mind, a stupid question. Of course it had to be him. Who else would it have ever been, who else in the universe? My eyes scanned the blasted landscape before me, drinking in the ravaged details, the burnt then frozen remnants of the scarred, barren battle-plain. No, I concluded, it had to be him, and maybe that was good. I didn't want him to live to see this.

It had been two years. Two years that had been a slow, long descent into an unavoidable and almost comfortable state of no emotion, no feeling. The years hadn't been dull. In fact, they were quite the opposite. Action packed scenes that had left me sweating alone at night, shivering beneath the thick sheets, had filled those two years with a very near terror. And I knew, like every other student, that the battle was far from over.

The scene before me was evidence of that.

Although there had been death, and terror, and heartache and pain too numerous to list, through it all, through everything, like a rock standing comforting in the middle of the raging storm, I had always expected the school to survive. It had for hundreds of years, through many such worse wars; through dark and light and all the flotsam jamming the way between. Surely one man's antics could not put an end to the creation wrought so many hundreds of years ago by four of his own level--indeed, greater? But they did, and it had, and now the moss that had just a year ago began to crawl its way over the desecrated ruins was freezing in the aftermath of its own birth. Shuddering, I looked around again. Sun had not touched this ground for months; the great dust cloud that had signaled the school's apocalypse still hung like a tombstone over the place, green and foreboding, grinning eerily down at the scene in sadistic triumph.

I knew that everything we had was gone. Voldemort had charged the school with his flock of Death Eaters...I'd barely gotten away alive. On the infamous day after our N. E. W. T. exams, the school had been blasted to bits. I'd been the last one out and had to stay with the Gryffindors in their shelter. We narrowly managed to keep our lives -- the Death Eaters had stomped right by our hideaway. Inches over and they would have stepped on my hand.

When my professor had finally signaled that the Death Eaters were gone, we'd slowly crept out of our shelter, eyes unwilling to take in the horror our exit held for us. Gone, everything, from the tall-spiraling towers to the invisible boundaries surrounding the grounds, wiped clean as if a giant hand had swept them carelessly away. My professor, a young man in his mid-twenties who had attended the school and lived there ever since, had just stood there, silently, mouth too open to form condolences. He looked around slowly, his grey eyes sweeping the landscape, wet and horror struck, looking over the soiled ruins of the only life he'd ever known. Turning to us, he tried to speak, but could only mouth the simple words, "I'm sorry." Quietly, hopelessly, with the look of a man who had lost his soul, he'd raised his wand, put it to his head...

"Avada Kedavra."

I would never forget those words.

The deaths...a lot of students had been killed...killed like him. They'd been destroyed without a pause to think, a pause to consider, their lives deleted as though they didn't matter. As though they were the bugs that Hagrid had left in boxes in front of his hut before taking a group of students and fleeing. Nobody had been able to stand up to the Death Eaters when they'd destroyed those with giant-blood inside of them. Nobody had stood up for the goblins, for the house elves (except for that one bushy-haired Gryffindor), for the werewolves. When they had gone, there had been nobody left to stand up for us.

I would have liked to say that they were not able to stand up, but of course that was not the case. It never was. No--fear was the incentive here, and a powerful one it was. Even the Ministry, who the survivors of our tragedy had hoped feverishly would leap to our rescue, had shrunk under the shadow of terror Voldemort had cast. Disappeared, in fact, without apology, and currently rumoured to be in hiding somewhere in Romania. The ones who were left--the regular witches and wizards, the students, even the Muggles--had been left without their main protectors, and suddenly found themselves forced to rely on their own wits, resources, to survive. Needless to say, the fallout of this occurrence had not been pretty. About the strongest rebels left now were guerilla bands, scattered throughout the isles attempting hit-and-run attacks on single Death-Eaters. The Aurors were being stretched thin by the demands suddenly placed upon them, and consequently, over-stressed and pushed into danger by citizens too afraid to fend for themselves, were dropping like flies. It was a bad situation, and was exponentially getting worse.

It did not help that Hogwarts was no longer grand and flourishing. The place where the school had been was a barren ground of dried blood and sharp, cutting memories that made every student who was strong enough to set a foot on that dusty ground break down in terrible, throat-ripping sobs that racked the body of all energy. Only the fact that I was here and came here often, to where I used to be...used to be happy kept me from breaking down completely. The new Hogwarts was based on teaching most Dark Arts magic. I slept on a filthy cot in the Hufflepuff and Ravenclaw girls' room, being taught magic in a series of underground caverns and shelters. It had been a four-day run to get to these pitifully held up caves that I hated with every pore of my body. There was definitely no Quidditch, no challenge anymore.

No fun challenge, at least. Every day there were constant reminders of our refugee status, not the least being the big list in the Prefects bathroom (recently converted into our main hall) of those who were dead or missing, starting from two years back with... with him, and winding hundreds or more up to the latest few. Many were Aurors; more were students, some of whom I'd known. Each day I would go up to the list, scan it for my family, who I'd not seen since the day the school had died, go back to my makeshift dorm praying I would never read their names there. In the meantime, we tried to concentrate our efforts on our classes--DATDA twice a day, every day. They weren't much help; not very many people paid attention to grades anymore, not even those who had, previously, been slated for Head Girl and Boy. In fact, a few of those candidates were not even at school anymore. Transferred, last I'd heard, to wizarding academies in America, France, and Romania, places where Voldemort's influence had not yet totally frozen things.

The worst part about our refugee status was that he wasn't there. He had been in my year at Hogwarts and we were close. If there had been dating at Hogwarts, we would have been. The first to be taken from Hogwarts and, as I had been told after I'd prodded around for information, the most thoughtless death. A death without planning. He wasn't even a pawn in the overall battle. Just a meaningless casualty to them. And because of somebody's inconsiderate actions, I didn't have anybody to talk to during the long days of the underground refuge.

There were the other Hufflepuffs, of course, but most of them were very dull, unhelpful and uninterested. Not terribly brave, either, but I couldn't blame them for that--that had been the Sorting Hat's choice. Sometimes I found myself wondering if that particular system of house-choosing might not have been optimum; it surely would have been nice to find more variety among the houses. Even so, none of them--Hufflepuffs or Ravenclaws, as much as I hate to admit--possessed the certain... aura he'd had, of confidence and security, the cock-eyed optimism and kindness that had always pulled my frown into a smile. I missed him terribly, and it showed, perhaps even more than the ripping apart of our world itself had managed to ravage itself on my mind. Days seemed longer, deaths quicker and closer, doom deeper and night darker, now that he was gone. Even the stars, harbingers of hope (to everyone save Professor Trelawney, of course) and perhaps the only constants in our rapidly-changing world, seemed dimmer for his lack.

I stood there, on what had been the old quidditch field, staring at the somehow-dimmer stars and remembering. Below the area of highly intense matches that had sent me after a meaningless flying ball, I stood there, remembering him. My eyes were too dried up from previously cried tears, so no tears touched that cold, blasted landscape. I just stood there, feeling my feet on the cold ground, freshly awash with the terror and despair that had crashed down upon Hogwarts and killed it.

And I looked into the sky.

***

A/N: The guy who committed suicide was NOT professor Lupin. Thank you. We have had three chances to kill him and we haven't yet. Can you guess who's point of view this is? If you are first, you get the satisfaction of knowing that you were first to guess who this is and who "him" is. Plus, if you guess who we are (we are two authors that have already put up things in the Harry Potter section), you'll get a prize: sporadic e-mails filled with crazy and worthless facts...remember to include your email if you guess!! Thank you and have a nice day.